Now comes the elephant: Morgan Stanley Capital International, the world's numero uno provider of stock benchmarks, will announce Sunday the changes it intends to make to its family of indexes.

The decision involves whether MSCI will follow its competitors and adjust all of its indexes to reflect companies' actual free floats. Those are the shares that you and your Aunt Bertha can actually buy -- meaning they exclude strategic stakes held by governments, companies and individuals. Free-floating also involves adjusting index...